


somebody hears you (you know that, you know that)

by niltia



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-06-29 09:48:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15726960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niltia/pseuds/niltia
Summary: Lieutenant Hank Anderson is uninterested in having anything to do with werewolves, given that a werewolf was responsible for the death of his son. He doesn't have much choice, however, when Captain Fowler assigns him a case that's going to require close contact with one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Hymn of Acxiom by Vienna Teng.

Hank wasn’t particularly interested in showing up for work, but Fowler had called him 18 times. When Hank arrived at the station, Fowler was in his office with the windows shaded. Not a good sign.

Hank cautiously pushed open the door. “You wanted to see me?”

Fowler frowned severely. “If that’s what you want to call me having to hound you to get you to come in and do your fucking job, sure. I’ve got a case for you.”

Hank stepped fully into the office and carefully shut the door behind him. “Alright, well, I’m here.” There was a stranger standing in the corner at parade rest, staring at Fowler. Weird. Maybe a consultant?

Fowler sighed. “Right. I’ve got a loose werewolf that has become our jurisdiction. I’m putting you on it.”

“What the fuck? A werewolf case? Fowler, I’m not equipped to —” Hank glanced at the other man in the room, expecting him to also be surprised. Then he noticed the shock collar. He stepped backward toward the door.

“Captain, what the fuck is that _thing_ doing here?”

The werewolf standing in the corner glanced at him, very briefly, and then returned to staring straight ahead. 

“Calm down, Anderson. It’s not going to fucking maul you right here. This one’s been lent to us by Kamski himself. It’s got a handler and they’re monitoring it. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Well, why the fuck is it here?”

“It’s going to help you find our werewolf fugitive. I guess Kamski uses this one for hunting down others when they get loose. Normally they handle strays in-house, but since this one’s a little more serious, it’s our problem now.”

Hank grimaced. “Werewolves hunting each other? That’s kind of fucked up, even for them.”

The strange werewolf in the corner flinched at that. Both Hank and Fowler turned to look. It looked away. 

“Anyway, we’ve got an escaped werewolf that probably has a child with it. It —”

“A kid? Jesus Christ, Fowler, why the hell would you pick me of all people for this case?”

“Well, I tried Reed first but he flat out told me he’d shoot this one as soon as they were out the door,” Fowler said as he gestured to the werewolf, “so believe it or not, you’re my more level headed choice. Is that good enough for you?”

“Fuck, fine, alright, what info do we have on this one? Why are we going after it instead of Kamski’s people?”

“We’ve only been handed this because it involved civilians. The loose werewolf killed her original owner and also held up a convenience store clerk and clawed him. Also, the owner’s got a daughter no one can account for, so now it’s probably kidnapping, assault, robbery, and murder, rather than just a lost property case. 

“Which one happened most recently? I guess if this thing,” Hank nodded his head at the werewolf, “is supposed to be my bloodhound, we should go wherever the scent is freshest, or whatever.”

Fowler nodded and tapped something on his tablet. “I’ve given you access to the file on this case. The convenience store hold up was late last night, and the estimated time of death for the owner is earlier in the evening.”

“Pardon me,” the werewolf said suddenly. 

“Shit, it speaks!” Hank said.

“Yes. Pardon me. It would be more effective to go to the subject’s home first, where the murder occurred, because that was probably the site of the stronger emotions and any remaining chemosignals will be informative about her emotional state and motivations. Furthermore, if the woman and child were living at this location for an extended period, visiting their home will allow me to obtain a better scent profile on each of them than the trace remains of their scents in a public business.”

Hank huffed. “Alright, I didn’t ask for a biology lesson. I guess that answers my question though. Let’s head out, then. Captain Fowler, I’ll let you know as soon as we find anything.”

“See that you do. And Lieutenant, make sure that your personal issues don’t interfere with you doing your job.”

—

When Connor woke up in his cell that morning, he wasn’t expecting how unusual a day it was going to be for him.

Obviously he expected the day was going to be awful, because every day of his life that he could remember had been awful, but at least some days were a new and different kind of awful. He dreaded the days when they sent him out on a retrieval mission because he knew that whatever happened to the other werewolves after he’d caught them was probably terrible, but he also perversely looked forward to those days because it was time during which he was outside of Kamski’s facilities and therefore wasn’t trapped alone in a cage or being tortured or experimented on for someone’s entertainment. And at least he personally wasn’t being ordered to kill anyone. Not after the first time they’d tried ordering him to do that, anyway.

Connor didn’t want to die, but he wanted to kill someone else even less. And apparently, for whatever reason, he was valuable enough to Kamski that they’d stopped trying to make him personally kill his own kind after his _extremely_ negative reaction the first time. They wanted to keep Connor alive. 

On this particular morning, Connor was taken to the usual room where his handler issued his instructions to him. For some reason, Amanda liked to give him his mission parameters in person, even though she could just as easily convey all the necessary information over the earpiece they’d surgically installed and forced his body to heal over. He suspected it was because she got a twisted enjoyment out of watching him as she told him exactly how he was going to betray his own people this time. Between the implanted satellite-connected camera at his temple and the earpiece, she could see everything he saw and hear everything he heard and said, but the satisfaction of seeing the his facial expressions and body language was reserved for their encounters at the start and end of each mission. 

Connor sat in the metal chair that was bolted to the floor next to the solitary metal table in the room, also bolted down. Connor could probably rip either of them out of the floor with a little bit of effort, but they hadn’t yet realized that and he didn’t want to give up his one perceived advantage. Even if he did rip the chair out of the floor and attack Amanda with it, he’d be subdued or killed in seconds. Sometimes he thought about doing it anyway.

Amanda entered the room, dressed impeccably as usual. Connor had the vague idea that her day job was as some sort of public relations official for Kamski. Keep the werewolves under control, maintain a positive public image, ensure that Kamski continues to be allowed to sell his product. “Good morning, Connor. How are you feeling this morning?” she asked pleasantly.

“I’m well, and you?” It was easier and safer to play along with her fake politeness. A lot of Connor’s memories were spotty, but he did remember that early on he’d cursed her out and tried to attack her on several occasions. The consequences had been unpleasant. Torturers had a lot more leeway when they knew that almost anything they chose to do would heal soon enough. 

“I am also well. I have a very interesting mission for you today, I think you’re going to enjoy it. We are going to lend you as a liaison to the Detroit Police. You’re very lucky to be getting this opportunity, Connor.”

She waited a moment, looking for a reaction, but Connor sat silently and maintained eye contact with her without saying anything. She made a little moue of distaste.

“One of your kind murdered a man, so we find ourselves in a position where cooperation with the police is necessary. You’re going to help them track it down and return it to us. It disabled its tracker, so you’re going to have to cooperate with the police and obtain for us any information they collect.” Amanda snapped a manila folder primly down onto the table and opened it. “Here’s its file.”

Connor looked it over carefully. His target was a 25-year-old woman, five feet five inches tall, brown hair, blue eyes. Sold to a Todd Williams six years ago. No surviving family relations, unusual for a Kamski-sold werewolf. Described by her initial handler as “docile.” No indications as to motive for escaping, which was sometimes indicated in the files they gave him, but Connor privately felt that the motive for anyone’s escape was obvious.

“A transport vehicle will be here to pick you up shortly. This could turn into a PR nightmare for us, but it’s also a chance for you to make a good impression for our company with public officials. I’d caution you to be on your best behavior, but I know you will be, won’t you?” Amanda asked with an eerie pleasant smile. It didn’t reach her eyes.

Connor nodded mutely. Blind obedience was the only way to get through conversations with Amanda.


	2. Chapter 2

Investigate a crime scene with a werewolf, Fowler said. You’ll be perfectly safe, Fowler said. Hank was having some trouble reconciling that with the reality that he was going to have to drive the werewolf _to_ the crime scene. He was not _super chill_ about having a werewolf in a tiny two-ton metal box with him. He was kind of regretting not agreeing to one of the autonomous patrol cars out of stubbornness right now. 

The werewolf had yet to do anything threatening, but Hank was unsettled just by its presence. It had followed him calmly to his car and buckled itself in to the passenger seat like this was just a regular old day. Now it was just sitting there staring unblinkingly out the windshield while Hank quietly flipped his shit over the prospect of getting into his own fucking car.

At least it wasn’t watching him have his parking lot freak-out.

Whatever. Whatever. So what if this thing took its opportunity and just killed him? It wasn’t like he didn’t think about driving off a bridge on a regular basis. Same result.

Hank opened his driver-side door and sat down. The werewolf glanced at him sideways but kept its face forward. Freaky. 

As soon as Hank turned his car on, his radio resumed the track that had been playing on his phone. The werewolf winced. Interesting. Hank entered the address of the victim’s house into his GPS and started up navigation. He could’ve sworn the werewolf looked relieved for the brief moments that the GPS narration overrode the music volume. 

The GPS took them to a house that looked like it had once been well-cared-for and comfortable but which had clearly seen better days. The yard was taped off and the front door was open. Ben was waiting impatiently in front of the steps to the house.

“Took you long enough, Anderson,” he said in greeting. Then he did an almost comically obvious double-take at Hank’s tag-along. “What the fuck is that?”

Hank grimaced. “Don’t ask me. Fowler told me to take it along. It’s going to track the escaped one or something, I guess.”

“I don’t want it coming in here.”

“Tough shit, take it up with the Captain. I’m supposed to let it sniff around or whatever.”

Ben scowled at him and stalked off down the porch steps, probably to do just that. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with Fowler but at least this way he wasn’t going to be complaining to Hank about it. Hank stepped inside the house and started looking around. 

The werewolf followed Hank into the house, carefully sidestepping Ben as he stormed off. It took a deep breath. “Lieutenant, it would be helpful if you could reduce the number of personnel currently in the building. I will be able to learn more about the situation if there are fewer conflicting scents present.”

Jesus Christ. “Are you serious right now?”

“I assure you that I take my mission very seriously.” Its mission. Fucking Hell.

Hank sighed. “Alright, alright, I’ll take care of it.” 

Hank asked most of the techs if they could go do whatever they did except upstairs for a bit, and most of them obliged, only curiously glancing at Hank’s new ‘partner’ and not asking questions. Only when the room was cleared of everyone except a photographer who was still collecting evidence did the werewolf actually move. 

It seemed to wander aimlessly around the first floor for a couple of minutes, staring intently at places on walls that didn’t look visually different from anywhere else, hovering near a lone dining chair, examining a bookshelf. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. 

Just when Hank was starting to grow impatient, it crouched down near a place on the floor where there was a faintly discolored area on the hardwood, maybe two feet in diameter. “Kara appears to have bled a significant amount here. It was badly cleaned up with bleach.”

“Kara? Is that the kid?”

“The child’s name is Alice. Kara is the name of the werewolf.” Although the sentence was very matter-of-fact, Hank still felt like he was being silently judged. 

Hank didn’t let on to his surprise that the fugitive werewolf had a name. It wasn’t even really a _surprise_ , per say, just that he’d never really thought about it. “So what, it got injured at some point in time?”

“That is likely. For a werewolf to have bled this much, the damage must have been severe. We heal significantly faster than humans.” It looked up at Hank expectantly, as though awaiting some sort of response to that. Hank didn’t really have anything to say. He was a homicide detective, it wasn’t like he was going to be shocked by some blood. “There is evidence of a history of long-term domestic abuse, both of Kara and of Alice.” This got a reaction out of Hank.

“He was abusing his kid? Fuck.” Good riddance, then.

“Yes, he was abusing Alice.” The werewolf’s expression was painfully neutral. Did it just not give a fuck? “The chemosignals present in this room from Kara and Alice indicate a prolonged level of extreme stress in both of them, likely going back several years. The abuse seems to have been both physical and verbal in nature, although not sexual.”

Wow, way to put that bluntly. “Explains why it killed him, then.”

“And why she left with the child. We have very strong ... instincts to take care of children we view as part of our pack group.” 

At least they knew the kid was probably relatively safe for the moment, then. A thought occurred to Hank. “Hey, do you also got a name? I can’t just keep calling you ‘it’ for the rest of forever.”

The werewolf actually had a noticeable reaction to that. Its lips thinned into a line, but then it appeared to catch itself actually having an expression. It looked both hesitant and angry at once. “My handlers call me Connor. They have told me that you may also call me that if you wish.”

“Your _handlers_ call you — Christ, alright, couldn’t just give me a simple answer. Connor it is, then.” Hank paused. “Wait, you said they told you? Just now?”

“That is correct. As Captain Fowler told you, I am being monitored at all times. This —,” here Connor indicated a weird circular object fucking _embedded_ into the right side of its face that Hank somehow hadn’t noticed before, “— is a camera. My handlers can see everything I see and hear everything I hear. They can also relay instructions to me via an earpiece. You are perfectly safe at all times.”

Hank stared at the camera device. Yeah, he wasn’t wrong, it was actually embedded in the werewolf’s temple. Brutal. “Is that why you hold your head so weird all the damn time?”

“Yes. My handler has requested that I try to ensure that the camera field of view is on the relevant objects.”

Hank didn’t really know what to say to that. It was bizarre and kind of depressing, and this whole situation was bizarre and depressing. It was shaping up to look like the fugitive werewolf had murdered its owner to protect a human kid, which was far outside the realm of what he had previously considered to be possible werewolf behavior. 

Hank must have been wrapped up in his own thoughts for too long, because the werewolf, Connor, spoke up again as though prompting him along. “I have a sufficient scent profile of both Kara and Alice that I should be able to track them if we cross paths with anywhere they have been within the last twenty-four hours, if you’d like to move on to the next location they were sighted?” Ah yes, right back to the weird werewolf ‘scent profile’ shit. One of them happening to have weirdly human motivations didn’t make the whole lot of them suddenly human. 

“Fine. Great. Alright then, Connor, let’s get a move on.” Hank wasn’t sure if he was imagining the way the werewolf looked ever so slightly pleased when he used its name.

—

As they drove to their next location, the site of the convenience store hold-up, Connor thought about the information he’d learned about his target’s home life from her residence.

The acrid reek of fear had practically slapped Connor in the face the moment he stepped into the house. He had stood still while the police lieutenant he’d been assigned to looked around the room for a moment, and then once he had acclimated to the scent, he took in another breath. Underneath the fear were layers of despair, other chemosignals given off by physical injury, and much more blood, sweat, and urine than should be prevalent as scents in a communal open area in a house this size. 

There were also, quite clearly, the scents of two werewolves. One adult female, one child. The child shared a close familial scent profile with the adult female werewolf. It did _not_ share a familial scent profile with the adult human male whose scent was also present in the house.

He was reasonably certain that the werewolf child he’d been able to discern the presence of was the same ‘kidnapped’ child the police department had presumed was the daughter of Mr. Williams. It was unusual for children to start expressing werewolf characteristics before puberty. This usually only happened under extreme duress. Because Connor had never actually encountered a werewolf _child_ before, he wasn’t even completely certain that the child was female based on its scent profile alone, but there were no other children’s scents present in the house. 

Connor also wasn’t certain how he knew this information to begin with if he’d never met a werewolf child, but it was probably for the same reason that there were plenty of other things he somehow knew factually but had no memory of learning. He didn’t dwell on it.

Connor had been careful to divulge none of these conclusions aloud in his report to Lieutenant Anderson. The domestic abuse situation was relevant to the investigation, so he had relayed that information, but the situation with the child was not explicitly related to his task of tracking down the woman. Or at least that’s what he told himself to justify not sharing it. 

Anything that Connor said out loud, Amanda would instantly know. And she would certainly modify the parameters of his mission to include bringing in the child if she was aware that it was a werewolf. There was nothing Connor could do about the fact that the woman he was tracking had killed a man and would be returned to Kamski’s facilities to be dealt with, but the child might be able to pass as human for a few more years yet. He didn’t doubt its secret would eventually be discovered, but _a few more years_ of a ‘human’ life was more than any of their kind got. 

Connor would estimate that he himself was somewhere between 28 and 32 years old. He had no memory of any time outside of captivity in Kamski’s facilities, but he also had no memory of a lot of other things. He was aware that the existence of werewolves had only been revealed to the public 26 years ago, so presumably there was some time in his life during which he had not been under Kamski’s thumb. Or maybe not. He was vaguely aware that the Kamski family had been instrumental in the public reveal of werewolves, and that they’d been hunting them for centuries long before anyone knew they weren’t a myth. Maybe Connor had been born in captivity to werewolves that they had kept to experiment on. There was no way for him to know, since he had no recollection of ever meeting another werewolf who shared any kind of family scent with him.


End file.
